Island-hopping On The Trail Of The Jungle Foe In The Pacific

169th's Prelude To Jungle Warfare

Island-hopping On The Trail Of The Japanese In The Solomons

Wwii: Looking Back

Connecticut's 169th

February 21, 1993|By ROBERT J. CONRAD; Courant Staff Writer

Connecticut's 169th Infantry Regiment sailed a zigzag course in a round-bottomed boat chased by white-bellied flying fish. In the first days out of San Francisco, the sea was rough and the soldiers were sick, but the regiment found gentler swells and warmer days across the Equator.

The troops docked in Auckland, New Zealand, on Oct. 22. A military band greeted them with "Deep in the Heart of Texas," and the 169th's band responded with a shipboard medley of swing tunes. Excited dockside crowds tossed coins to the troops.

New Zealand was safely distant from the fighting on Guadalcanal, yet the nation's men were across the world fighting Germans in North Africa. With the Japanese driving toward Australia, New Zealand residents fully expected their islands to be next. They took comfort in the arrival of the New England troops.

The 169th moved almost immediately to a small town about 50 miles north of Auckland, where the troops camped in huts and began intensive training. When the transport ships were unloaded in Auckland, troops returned to the docks to assemble military vehicles and haul supplies to storage dumps.

As the 169th's first stop, English-speaking New Zealand could not have been better. October was springtime on the country's northern island, where Easter cala lilies grew in the wild. The climate had the feel of New England, maybe warmer, and on days off the troops walked the countryside, enjoying the rolling, grassy hills of dairy and sheep farms.

New Zealand had a wealth of native fruit, including oranges, lemons, grapefruit, apples and plums. And hunting, a popular local sport, was encouraged in part by bounties on the abundant rabbits and deer that poached in the orchards.

The 169th's stay in New Zealand lasted only a month. In late November, the regiment was shipped north to New Caledonia, a French

island with a huge natural harbor at Noumea, its capital. Allied ships clogged the harbor awaiting the unloading of supplies intended for the embattled Marines on Guadalcanal. The 169th was there to help unload.

The Japanese had counterattacked furiously on Guadalcanal, and the battle there was turning on the ability of each side to reinforce and supply troops on the island.

The Allies had invaded Guadalcanal in August to get control of an enemy airstrip. The attack took the Japanese by surprise, in part because the Japanese troops who had swept across Southeast Asia and the South Pacific were accustomed to being the attackers, not the defenders.

As each Japanese thrust on Guadalcanal was repulsed, and as the U.S. Navy stalled Japanese reinforcements, the battle slowly turned in the Allies' favor.

The first week of February 1943, the Japanese evacuated 12,000 troops from Cape Esperance on Guadalcanal. A few stragglers took cover in the jungle, but by Feb. 9, 1943, the Japanese were virtually gone.

A few days later, the 169th finally received orders to relieve the Americal Division on Guadalcanal. The troops left on Feb. 15, and on Feb. 17, near an island south of Guadalcanal, the convoy was attacked by a squadron of Japanese torpedo planes.

Troop transports, along with supply and ammunition barges sailed in the center of a perimeter patrolled by Allied destroyers. The Japanese pilots sought to penetrate the perimeter and attack the lightly defended ships inside.

Infantry machine gunners were ordered to stay on the transport decks. At dusk, a Japanese bomber slipped through the destroyers and dived for the 169th. Machine guns on deck opened up, and as the bomber neared, it burst apart. Earl Gagnon of Hartford was credited with the 169th's first kill of the war.

"The funny part is, when you're going on a mission like that you never know where your first combat is going to be, your baptism of fire," says Hugh Finkle of East Hartford, a service company member. "You don't expect it to be at sea. You expect it to be at Guadalcanal."

No one was hurt and everyone was thrilled.

"Now everybody's saying, geez, this war is a breeze," says Larry Buckland of Bristol. "Nobody's getting hurt. This is great."

The convoy reached Guadalcanal the next day, and the 169th set up camp about 500 yards ashore.

They found a broad coastal plain leading inland to mountains that rose 7,000 feet. Fast-running rivers coursed down from the hills to beaches of black volcanic sand.

"And to see bridges made out of mahogany," says William Kean of West Hartford. "You grew up thinking mahogany was for furniture. There they just made lumber out of it."

The troops of the 169th inspected abandoned Japanese equipment and fortifications and listened to Marine and Army veterans describe the fighting on Guadalcanal. The damage left an impression.

"That's a lot of rock 'n' roll," Kean says. "You don't think that anybody could survive anything like that. It's amazing the amount of punishment they could take and still hold their ground."

Wrecked Japanese landing craft along the beaches attested to Japanese desperation.